Once upon a time, man learned to master fire. Something no other living creature has done before him. Man conquered the entire world. One day he found a new fire. A fire so powerful that it could never be extinguished. Man reveled in the thought that he now possessed the powers of the universe. Then in horror, he realized that his new fire could not only create but also destroy. Not only could it burn on land but also inside all living creatures; inside his children, the animals, the crops. Man looked around for help, but he found none. And so he built a burial chamber deep in the bowels of the earth, a hiding place for the fire to burn --- into eternity.We have conquered all sorts of disasters, water and fire, decomposition of materials, climate change; we have conquered nature itself, but the biggest threat against the survival of mankind is, surprise surprise, man. Human intrusion remains as the biggest problem faced by onkalo (Finnish for 'hiding place'), a nuclear waste repository in Finland built to last, and expected to be unopened, for a hundred thousand years. The span of recorded history is only 5% of that, and our civilization has only lasted for a tiny fraction of that fraction. So what are we in relation to what seems to be an eternity? A droplet from an ocean, leaf in a forest, lighted matchstick in a dark tunnel 500 metres underground. Picturing a future so far ahead is not something the human imagination is capable of, let alone communicate with; and this documentary is about the attempt, the need to send a warning to a civilization that might not share our technology, knowledge, language or even our symbols. I think it is most ironic that the only thing we will most certainly have in common -- morbid curiosity, the desire to explore and discover -- would ultimately lead to their downfall. To those people, there's nothing else I can say but good luck and for the love of god, stop digging.
There are not too many movies that spark the imagination like the doc Into Eternity does. It presents a complicated problem that will take place over a period of time beyond our comprehension. The problem presented is how to properly store nuclear waste for one hundred thousand years. Take a moment and try to comprehend that amount of time. By modern measurement of time, Christ was born two thousand and fifteen years ago. Within that period of time, even how we classify time has changed (B.C.-A.D. to B.C.E.-C.E.) based solely on a massive shift in religious belief. Now try to think how much will change in one hundred thousand years. Our radioactive waste could become religiously worshiped, or thought of as some demonic presence in the future. This is just one of the many bizarre things that one thinks of while watching Into Eternity. It also helps that the film is very well made, and all the visuals, the talking heads, and even the music, help fuel the imagination whilst trying to comprehend a hundred thousand years into the future. It is crazy to think that I will not even be alive to see the completion of the nuclear waste storage facility in Finland. Seriously, watch this doc and then just let your mind go wild thinking about everything the film addresses. It is truly a great experience.
This is not a documentary on nuclear waste. This is an existential horror show. Into Eternity is not a film that needs to be seen. It needs to be taught. People today need a little dash of perspective in their lives of excess and immediate satisfaction. It's this kind of mentality that has all but sealed the fate of humanity for the next 100,000 years. Unless you believe in something like reincarnation, nothing in this documentary is presented as being an immediate threat to your safety. What it succeeds at though is presenting itself as a message from the future. A warning from the ether. Not often are documentaries styled like this but the films ominous foretellings warrant the chilling, but philisophical tone. Into Eternity decides to roll with that as opposed to bogging us down with science and rambling professors which I thought was a wise choice for an educational tool. Anybody can take away from the film that man rushed to aquire God-like power before we could figure out how to manage the destructive waste. And this causes a problem that could potentially last well over hundreds of thousands of years from now. The primary focus of the film is on a European project to store hundreds of years worth of nuclear waste in a massive vault called Onkalo. They claim it's being designed to las multiple generations from now but will the stability of the surface world be enough from keeping years worth of death and destruction from accidentally spilling out? The film ponders this question among many others. Will future generations succeed in fixing these mistakes of our past? Or will they continue to pass on the responsibility further? In nearly 100 years the best method of disposal we've come up with is basicallt burying it in the ground and it looks like we haven't made much progress beyond that. How long and how far can you just keep burying irresponsibility within our earth before global ecological disaster strikes? We have the power now to dictate whether or not our planet will be habitable for our kid's kids. And their kid's kids and so forth. It's beyond human comprehension to imagine a world that far into the future but it's time to start trying.
